Eight
people, Products of the Lebensborn Program
to Propagate Aryan Traits, Met to Exchange Their
Stories.

Eight
people, products of the Lebensborn program to propagate
Aryan traits, met recently to exchange their
stories.

By MARK LANDLER
November 7, 2006

WERNIGERODE, Germany,
Nov. 4 -- For Guntram Weber, the journey that led to this quaint
town of horse-drawn carts and half-timbered houses was long,
wrenching, and anything but redemptive.

Four years ago, Mr.
Weber discovered that his father was not, as his mother had told
him, a young soldier who died honorably on the battlefield during
World War II. Instead, he was a high-ranking SS officer, who
oversaw the deaths of tens of thousands of people while stationed
in what is now western Poland.

"He died peacefully
in Argentina, with his old comrades standing at his grave and
raising their right arms," Mr. Weber said, his voice thick
with anger and grief. "A racist is forever a racist."

As Mr. Weber, 63,
told his story to a hushed room of mostly gray-haired men and
women here, there were sympathetic nods, but little surprise. Most
had their own tales of deceit and discovery, life histories that
proved to be homespun fairy tales, the dark truth buried under
layers of silence.

These are the
children of the Lebensborn, an SS program devised to propagate
Aryan traits. On this chilly weekend, they gathered here in a
corner of central Germany to share their stories, and to speak
publicly, for the first time, about the horror of finding out they
had been bred to be the next generation of Nazi elite.

"This is the
opposite example of the Holocaust," said Gisela Heidenreich, 63, a
family therapist from Bavaria, whose mother was unmarried and
whose father, she later discovered, was a senior SS officer. "The
idea was to further the Aryan race by whatever means were
available."

A
doctor, administrator and children in Wernigerode, circa
1943-5. Many of the mothers in the program were single,
the fathers SS officers.

Lebensborn, or spring of
life, refers to a series of clinics scattered throughout Germany
and neighboring countries, to which pregnant women, most of them
single, went to give birth in secret. They were cared for by
doctors and nurses employed by the SS, the Nazi Party's feared
paramilitary unit.

One such clinic
sits at the top of a gentle hill in Wernigerode, a remote town
near the Harz Mountains. The building, long abandoned now, was
part of a bittersweet homecoming tour for the 40 or so people who
turned out for the meeting of an association known as Traces of
Life.

To be accepted into
the Lebensborn, pregnant women had to have the right racial
characteristics --blonde hair and blue eyes-- prove that they had
no genetic disorders, and be able to prove the identity of the
father, who had to meet similar criteria. They had to swear fealty
to Nazism, and were indoctrinated with Hitler's ideology while
they were in residence.

Many of the fathers
were SS officers with their own families. Heinrich Himmler, the
head of the SS, encouraged his men to sire children outside of
marriage as a way of building a German master race.

About 6,000 to
8,000 people were born in these clinics in Germany between 1936
and 1945. Because of the program's secrecy, most were not told for
decades the circumstances of their births or the identities of
their fathers, which were not recorded on their birth
certificates. Some still do not know the truth.

Only in the last 20
years, as the wall of silence began crumbling, have researchers
been able to document the Lebensborn program. They have knocked
down some prurient myths: that these clinics were Nazi bordellos,
stocked with flaxen-haired breeders ready to mate with SS
men.

"The children were
conceived in all the usual ways: love affairs, one-night stands,
and so forth," said Dorothee Schmitz-Köster, who has written
a book about Lebensborn. "Abortion was not legal in Germany then,
and in many cases, the women did not want to keep the
babies."

Some of the mothers
gave them up for adoption to SS families. Others raised the
children alone, telling them that their fathers had been killed in
the war. Having given birth to illegitimate babies in a fervently
Nazi setting, the mothers faced a double stigma in postwar
Germany.

Many lived out
their lives in grim silence, their children say. Some developed
psychological problems or turned to alcohol. For the children, the
discovery of the truth was equally traumatic.

Mr. Weber, a
creative writing teacher in Berlin, is still struggling to come to
grips with his recently uncovered roots. Some hints from family
members, followed by research, led him to the truth. Among his
more unpleasant discoveries: his godfather was Himmler.

"Most grew up
knowing they had a secret," Ms. Schmitz-Köster said. "They
were angry at their mothers, because they had been lied to or
abandoned. Some feel shame. There are also a small number who are
proud of being Lebensborn. They feel they are part of an
elite."

For Lebensborn children
born outside Germany, life was even harsher. In Nazi-occupied
Norway, for example, the SS established a clinic because Himmler
valued the appearance of Scandinavians. Those babies, born of
Norwegian mothers and German soldiers, were branded as children of
the enemy after the war, and faced pitiless
discrimination.

Other children who
met Himmler's pernicious racial standards were kidnapped as
infants from their families in Nazi-occupied countries and sent to
Germany, where proper Nazi families raised them.

If anything, the
reunion served as proof that racial engineering has its limits.
The Germans here looked no different from those at any other
gathering of Germans in their golden years: the men with
salt-and-pepper beards and balding pates, the women with
eyeglasses and frosted hair.

"I'm really an
exception," said Ms. Heidenreich, a tall woman with long blond
hair and bright blue eyes.

Ms. Heidenreich,
the first of the Lebensborn children to write a book about her
experience, argues that the program, sinister as it was, has
echoes in today's world. With advances in genetics, she notes,
discriminating parents will soon be able to select traits in their
unborn children.

Given that
possibility, she said, the evils of the Nazi era must not be
allowed to recede into the history books. "If we start engineering
blond-haired, blue-eyed babies, can we blame just Hitler?" she
said.

Ms. Heidenreich was
born in a clinic in Oslo, although her parents were German. Her
mother chose to give birth there to get as far away as possible
from the village in Bavaria where she had grown up. Ms.
Heidenreich was not told about her background but became
suspicious after watching a television documentary about the
Lebensborn children.

Today, she has
trouble reconciling the kindly figure her mother became in later
years with the committed Nazi she had been. "She was a lovely
grandmother, even if she was a horrible mother," she
said.

Not everybody has
had a fraught experience. Ruthild Gorgass, who was born here, said
her mother told her about the circumstances of her birth when she
was a teenager. Ms. Gorgass had some contact with her father, a
manager for a chemical factory, who had another family.

Her mother left her
a photo album with an account of her stay in Wernigerode. She had
recalled it as an idyllic time, though she had expressed distaste
for her daughter's naming ceremony, in which the baby was placed
before an altar bearing a swastika.

"I was really lucky
because I had a talkative mother," said Ms. Gorgass, 64, a retired
physical therapist.

As she thumbed
through the album, she put on a pair of reading glasses. Peering
over them, she said with smile: "My eyes aren't perfect. We've got
all the same illnesses and disabilities as other people
have."